The Fair

Sweetie and I packed up the boys and headed off to the fair last night. For some reason or another we didn’t make it out there last year. I always think that with a 19 day window finding the time would be a snap, but truth lies and the devil is in the details. However, I was not about to miss it two years in a row. We met up with my brother's family and in that chaotic way the under 6 crowd can spin you, spent the next few hours struggling for balance on that edge of happiness and stress.

Ike, the youngest boy, wasn’t all that much interested in sitting in the stroller after a bit. I’m guessing peoples belt buckles all start to look the same after a while and if any of you know Ike, he’s more of a faces kind of guy. So Sweetie and I just took turns carrying that laughing, kicking, sack of ‘taters, and though we did just fine, I can feel it in my arms this morning I tell you what. We’re gonna have to work on some sort of papoose for next time. Come to think of it, we better work on that now cause he’s not getting any lighter and I imagine that in a year or two more doing what we did last night would be near impossible.

We did all the fair things we were supposed to do: all the rides and burgers and corn-dogs and lemonade, scones under the grandstand, and house-ware demonstrations.

It’s easy to believe in this world that things are in a constant state of change. That presidencies matter, that foreign policy, 9/11, Israel and Ireland all have an effect and take their toll here at home. That the fall of communism, The Dog House, Top Of The Pier, Chubby and Tubby, The Polar Bear Room and Saddam Hussein each take a bite out of life as we know it and after some digesting hand it back to us a little more soiled.

It’s easy to buy into that lie: to sit agape at the TV and swear that the world is going to hell all around you. But the truth is that all that stuff is just window dressing. I’ll tell you a secret. Nothing has changed really, and all it takes to prove it is just one afternoon spent at the fair. Since my first trip to Puyallup back in 1981 this country has been through four presidents, three wars, VHS and Beta, and the birth of the ATM. And though there was a lack this year of the fuchsia-colored feather roach-clip that has been a mainstay of fair barkers in the past, you can still buy the black light American flag posters, the colored-sand-bottle-birds, spin art, corn dogs, get your colors done, buy a tub of quick n bright, glass figurines, and your pick of pressure cooker/deep fryers. You can still get great deals on hot tubs and campers and gazebos and yard art, curly fries and sno-cones.

But it’s not just the stuff that hasn’t changed. We haven’t changed. I haven’t changed.

No mater what major milestones I feel like I’ve made in my life, no mater the growth I’ve done as a person/husband/father/musician I’m still exactly the same person who first went to the fair 22 years ago. We all are really, it’s just that I think as I get older, it gets a lot harder to cut though all the noise and static of every day living, and easier to see all that distraction as reality. As incorrigible as I sometimes see myself, there’s just no getting around the fact that this feels like home.

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